Terrific interview by Jamie Stuart with Leon Vitali, who acted for and worked with Stanley Kubrick for over 20 years.

He never used storyboards. Never used storyboards. That’s a wonderful feeling of freedom you have as an actor, and I’ve said several times that Stanley was the closest to a theater director that I ever worked with. […] Because the way he found his first shot, he used to walk around the set with an Arriflex tube and just change lenses, look around, down, up, move away, move around. Once he found his first shot, he knew he could build the scene from that point.

I complained yesterday that iTunes wasn’t identifying the tracks I’d previously purchased which should have been eligible to upgrade to iTunes Plus. Ends up it was my fault: I have two iTunes Store accounts, and all my eligible tracks were purchased using my older account. After I logged in using that account, the upgrade worked as expected.

They’re calling it a “mobile companion”, but it’s really just a $499 Linux-based compact notebook. The UI is screen-based rather than window-based — the apps are all full-screen. Not shipping until sometime this summer.

It seems to me Palm is trying to reverse the typical relationship, where your phone/PDA is a peripheral to your PC, and instead create a PC that is a peripheral to your phone.

If you haven’t already, it’s time to reevaluate the strength and power of the company that nearly went out of business ten years ago… as well as the power of consumer technology in an industry once dominated by the enterprise.

Thousands of the most current and popular YouTube videos will be available on Apple TV at launch in mid-June, with YouTube adding thousands more each week until the full YouTube catalog is available this fall.

Apple also announced a second Apple TV configuration with a 160 GB hard drive, available tomorrow for $399. (The standard Apple TV has a 40 GB drive and costs $299.)

Email is such a funny thing. People hand you these single little messages that are no heavier than a river pebble. But it doesn’t take long until you have acquired a pile of pebbles that’s taller than you and heavier than you could ever hope to move, even if you wanted to do it over a few dozen trips. But for the person who took the time to hand you their pebble, it seems outrageous that you can’t handle that one tiny thing. “What ‘pile’? It’s just a fucking pebble!”

I know the feeling. Current unread count for my @daringfireball.net inboxes: 5,548.

My brief experience: I bought a new iTunes Plus album, and it worked perfectly. Unsurprisingly, the Plus tracks contain embedded metadata with the name and email address from your Apple ID/iTunes account. The upgrade feature seems broken, though: I own a bunch of tracks that should be eligible to upgrade, but when I click the “Upgrade to iTunes Plus” link, iTunes says none of my tracks are eligible. Update: My fault. Ends up all my eligible tracks were purchased using a second iTunes Store account; after I logged in using that ID, I upgraded successfully.

I don’t think it’s worth making a big deal over whether they’ve already sold one million Zunes or whether they will by the end of June. My question is, if they’ve sold even close to one million of them, how come I’ve never seen one person using one? Seriously, I’ve never seen a single Zune in the wild.

So here’s a couple ways to a create successful game online: a), Find an investor who’s crazy enough to give you millions of dollars, or b), Put it on a distribution network and hope you get enough customers willing to buy it as a download.

Then there’s c), Make a Flash mini-game, let people play it for free, and watch the ad revenue pour in when the site gets 20 million pageviews a month.

Thursday, 24 May 2007

Update: I had a scary first reboot after installation — the machine just spun at a blank blue screen. I gave it 20 minutes before force-rebooting the machine, after which all seems well. (I do a full SuperDuper clone of my startup drive each night, so it wasn’t that scary.)

This is not a matter of isolated typographical errors. It is a
serious case for the comma police, since the book’s war on
punctuation is almost as heated as the air assaults it describes.
“One would have to be dead, very stupid Fuchida thought,” the book
says about the fighter pilot Mitsuo Fuchida, “not to realize they
were sallying forth to war.” Evidence notwithstanding, the authors
do not mean to insult the fighter pilot’s intelligence — or,
presumably, the reader’s.

If you live and breathe gadgets, this is your chance to get paid to write about them (seriously, this is a paying gig!). Professional writing experience isn’t necessary (though it doesn’t hurt); all we really care about is that you can write about gadgets with wit, concision, and authority.

Since I couldn’t find an Apache handler (plug-in) or a CGI for Markdown, I wrote a very simple wrapper for Gruber’s Markdown.pl. Conceptually, my wrapper spits out an HTML header, uses Markdown.pl to render the requested page as (X)HTML, and then appends an (X)HTML footer. The reality is slightly more complicated, due to the vagaries of figuring out the document’s title, and conditionally inserting it back into the output as an <H1> tag. Even so, the whole thing is under 60 lines, mostly whitespace and comments.

In fact, VoodooPad can create and store its pages as plain text. I added this feature in 3.0 specifically because folks wanted to be able to check their documents into subversion, do diffs, and also edit them from the command line. You can also have individual pages in a document be plain text, and others rich text (via the Format → Make Plain Text menu).

I don’t worry about the format data is stored in on-disk, so long as the app in question can export everything to an open format.

Nice write-up in Time magazine on 37signals. Weirdest thing I noticed is that the article doesn’t contain a single URL — they mention a couple of their apps and their Signal vs. Noise weblog, but don’t give the URLs for any of them.

Wednesday, 23 May 2007

I’m getting lots of email from people saying this whole issue of 6-bit notebook displays is bullshit, because all notebook displays from all vendors are in fact 6-bit, and that they all simulate millions of colors using “temporal dithering”. If so, fine by me, so long as the results look good.

But that’s not what this tech note from Apple says. For example, regarding the 17-inch iMac, it says:

The graphics card temporally dithers the 6 bits per component to show up to millions of colors.

But regarding the MacBook Pro, it says:

The display supports 3D acceleration and display depths up to 24 bits per pixel at all supported screen resolutions.

The 17-inch MacBook Pro supports an LCD display size of 1680 × 1050 pixels at 116 dpi and shows up to millions of colors.

I’ll be founding a Web startup, EveryBlock, that focuses on making
local news and information useful. I’ve been feeling the
entrepreneurial itch for a while and can’t wait to start hacking on
this with a crack team of Web developers. Expect to hear much more
about this from me, including job ads.

No proof, just circumstantial evidence. I noticed all the Britishisms long ago, but I think Valleywag is wrong: Fake Steve is far funnier than Kahney. I don’t recall Kahney ever having written a single funny sentence under his own byline.

After 5 intensive months of development, RubyCocoa 0.11.0 is out. It’s a very big release, as you can see from the release notes. We also feature a completely new website (which is actually a Wiki, easy to maintain for us programmers).

Chris Pepper on the CS3 installer’s disabling of the Mac OS X firewall:

Stopping the firewall temporarily is opening customers to unnecessary risk. It’s bad, but Adobe’s in good company here. On the other hand, saying this is necessary is either a lie about security (never a good idea) or gross technical incompetence (not a real improvement).

Tuesday, 22 May 2007

False press release in 2000 forged by former employee and issued via a wire service the company had never before used. The hoax PR caused Emulex to lose 62 percent of its market cap in 16 minutes of trading. (Thanks to reader Charlie Loyd.)

I have to say that I, too, would have posted this news based on the source. The email was in fact sent from Apple’s email server to Apple employees and was then forwarded to Engadget from a trusted source. Ryan says “For a reporter, this kind of thing — an internal memo to a company’s employees — is solid gold” and I agree. This was almost as good as a formally issued press release.

Email: Easy to spoof.

Formal press releases from a major corporation: Difficult to spoof. (Can anyone think of an example of a fraudulent official press release from a major corporation?)

Christopher Breen on the sea change in mainstream media coverage of Apple:

What was unusual about that coverage was that — for once — it didn’t portray Apple’s products as pretty but overpriced and Apple’s customers as artsy-fartsy kooks. Rather, the press seemed willing to entertain the notion that Mac users might be savvy consumers seeking quality and ease of use in an attractive wrapper.

Markzware, makers of FlightCheck, have filed a lawsuit against the makers of a competing preflight document-checking app, on the grounds that it violates a patent for a “Device and method for examining, verifying, correcting and approving electronic documents prior to printing, transmission or recording.”

It sounds like they’re claiming to own a patent covering the entire concept of preflight software. For shame.

So if Microsoft ever sued Linux distributor Red Hat for patent infringement, for instance, OIN might sue Microsoft in retaliation, trying to enjoin distribution of Windows. It’s a cold war, and what keeps the peace is the threat of mutually assured destruction: patent Armageddon — an unending series of suits and countersuits that would hobble the industry and its customers.

Chuq Von Rospach, on the question of whether it was easy to send a bogus email through Apple’s internal announcement mailing list:

Well, I wrote the listserver used to distribute groups internal to Apple, so I can comment on this (a bit). The easy answer is “hell, no, Apple’s not an idiot”. But that doesn’t mean the server can’t be spoofed; any email system can be spoofed if you understand email and study the system. Someone here clearly did. It’s even somewhat possible that the message originated offsite (depending on how the list was configured), but one thing I can guarantee — wherever it originated, there was someone on the inside of the company who put time and energy into understanding how to spoof the system to make this work.

The somewhat odd thing was that the team knew FreeHand MX was going to be their last release. I remember a certain FreeHand engineer’s response to the question “why are you trying to cram so many features into this release?” as being “Because they’re not going to let us do another.”

The song isn’t necessarily over, however: EMI’s shares rose Monday to 271 pence, above the 265 pence per share that Terra Firma has offered. That suggests investors hope another bidder will step up or that the takeover price will be raised.

Sunday, 20 May 2007

Part of a photo essay accompanying this profile in Time, which quotes Steve Jobs as saying, regarding the idea of Gore running for president in 2008, “We have dug ourselves into a 20-foot hole, and we need somebody who knows how to build a ladder. Al’s the guy. Like many others, I have tried my best to convince him. So far, no luck.”

Nonetheless, it’s not really possible to get past the idea of “millions” as a few hundred thousand plus a trick of the eye. The question then becomes whether Apple will try to do just that or settle out of court.

Apparently some MacBooks and MacBooks Pros are equipped with displays that are only capable of 6-bit color depth, despite the fact that they’d advertised as 8-bit displays. (6-bit displays are only capable of displaying 262,144 simultaneous colors; 8-bit displays can display 16,777,216.) Jesper has one of these MacBooks, and he’s pissed about it — and rightfully so.

Wednesday, 16 May 2007

Kevin Kelleher on the bogus rumor that the iPhone had been delayed until October and Leopard until next January:

In the volatile 23 minutes of turmoil between the minute the disinformation hit the stock market at 8:55 PST and Apple’s announcement that the initial email “is fake and did not come from Apple,” nearly 15 million shares changed hands. That’s 60% of Apple’s normal volume in well under a half hour. That’s also an awful lot money lost for some investors — and gained for others — all of it because of a lie.

Sig Software and TLA Systems are also both pleased to announce that DragThing is now the official upgrade path for all existing users of Sig Software’s Drop Drawers. In a rare collaboration between independent developers, TLA Systems and Sig Software have worked closely together for the past few months to make this transition as smooth as possible.

Tuesday, 15 May 2007

My name is on a software patent. It happened during my brief tenure at IBM. The patent is not yet issued (as I understand it, issuance may take years) and does not show up in USPTO or Google Patent Search. But it will, someday.

This is a stand-alone Macintosh application that converts .docx documents — that is, documents saved by Word 2007 for Windows in the Office Open XML file format — into rich text format (RTF) documents so that they can be automatically opened in either Word 2004 or Word v.X for Mac OS X.

After a $20 mail-in rebate, these 1 GB chips are just $27. Even if you’re like me and never get around to redeeming most rebates, $47 isn’t bad. For comparison, upgrading a MacBook to 2 GB of RAM from Apple still costs $175 — and you really do want 2 GB of RAM in a MacBook, given the way the video card leeches memory from the main system.

A specially written piece of software takes a tiny snapshot of the film every second. Each row contains sixty of these frames, representing one minute of film time. This process continues for the whole movie resulting in an image that becomes greater than the sum of its parts, in effect creating a unique visual fingerprint of the film.

Saturday, 12 May 2007

Over the past several months I’ve witnessed a strange kind of identity transference occurring within the Twitter community. Many people have come to associate the Blue Bird mascot of Twitterrific as representing Twitter itself.

One man’s search for the world’s first TV remote control. One model had just two buttons:

Push the Channel button to go lower one channel. Want to go higher? Sorry, you have to go lower until you go all the way round the circle. Similar for Volume, three settings for Low, Medium, High, Off.

Thursday, 10 May 2007

Asked about the iPhone during an interview with McKinsey Quarterly (registration required, but it’s free), Nokia’s Keith Pardy said:

The iPhone will definitely shake up the North American market; $500
to $600 per device will help establish a new pricing paradigm.
Consumers will now start to equate price with the physical handset.
That’s good. I personally think the iPhone will be very good for the
industry because competition is good and always stimulates new
ideas. But we should also remember the scale of the ambition Apple
has set itself: they are talking about getting one share point of a
billion devices per year. Nokia is focused on winning 40 percent of
this market.”

This strikes me as honest and savvy. Just keep in mind, though, that the top one percent of the market is very, very profitable.

A good fundamental rule for software development is to avoid premature optimization. Don’t guess what code ought to be optimized to make the whole system faster. Get it working first, then measure to identify where the bottlenecks really are.

Joyent’s DTrace-enabling patches for Ruby give Rails developers much better tools for measuring exactly where the bottlenecks are in a live web app.

This Mini Player view is notable because iTunes is the only iApp that has such a state. Ostensibly this is because you may need quick access to your music controls when in other apps. But I think some other apps could use a mini state. Specifically, Apple’s Mail.

My initial reaction is that it’s more of an argument that Apple
should allow Dashboard widgets to live in the regular window
layers. There are some widget-sized status windows that’d be convenient to keep visible all the time.

When was the last time you saw a new hit web site developed using
Microsoft’s web stack?

A slew of readers wrote in to point out that MySpace now runs on .Net. It was originally written using ColdFusion (!) and was ported over to .Net last year.

According to this post from Microsoft’s Scott Guthrie, MySpace does 1.5 billion page views a day. That’s impressive. But it still doesn’t count as a hit new site developed using Microsoft’s web stack — clearly their switch to .Net was a success, but it happened after they became a billion-dollar subsidiary of News Corp.

My point isn’t really whether Microsoft’s web development kit is good or bad, but simply that all of the grassroots-level developer enthusiasm is for open source tools (and Flash).

Monday, 7 May 2007

Some journalists, such as Thomas L. Friedman, of the Times, earn
more if one factors in speeches and books, but when, recently,
Mossberg signed a four-year contract, two Journal sources told me,
his annual compensation approached a million dollars. Mossberg
refuses to discuss his pay; a friend with knowledge of the
negotiations says that “pay has always been an issue at the
Journal,” and that Mossberg doesn’t want to be viewed as a “prima
donna.”

I’m sure this jackass from PC World thinks the headline should have been “Ten Things We Love About Walt Mossberg”.

PC World has published the “10 Things We Hate/Love About Apple Stories” that led to editor Harry McCracken’s resignation last week. They also published a short introduction to the two pieces that mentions the dispute, but explains nothing.

The articles are exactly what you think they are: insipid crap. (E.g. #2 on the hate list is that Apple is too secretive about upcoming plans, and #8 is the 1998 round hockey puck mouse.) I’m more convinced than ever that the dispute between McCracken and Colin Crawford was about editorial authority, not anything specific to these articles.

Before Y Combinator, I was a student at Stanford. Then I worked at Reddit for a while — the four of us packed into a small 3-bedroom apartment in Somerville, MA (I slept in the cupboard). Then we got bought by Condé Nast (the publishers of Wired, Elle, The New Yorker, Details, GQ, etc.) and they moved us out to San Francisco to work at the Wired offices and then they fired me. On the plus side, I did get this nifty shirt.

Sherm Pendley, creator and maintainer of CamelBones, on why Apple announced support in Leopard for writing Cocoa apps using Ruby and Python but not Perl:

They asked around internally for “sponsor” engineers to accept the
job of reviewing a scripting bridge for code quality, running
compatibility tests, etc. They found volunteers for Python and
Ruby early on — but not for Perl.

The good news is, there’s a volunteer for Perl now too, and the
pushed-back release date for Leopard has bought us a little
breathing room. So there’s still a chance for Perl to be a first
class citizen. The bad news is, we arrived late to the party and
there’s a lot of catching up to do.

(By the way, if you’re looking for a freelance programmer, Pendley is looking for work.)

The “standard” template for web-based forum design is just awful — just dozens and dozens of boxes for something that shouldn’t be boxy at all. 37signals’s new forum design is a good rethinking of the form. It’s just lists: a list of forums, a list of topics within each forum, and a list of posts within each topic.

It’s an apt pairing of form and function. These things are lists, and now that’s what they look like. This simple list-based visual style is the default for Beast, the new Rails-based forum software 37signals started using back in March for Highrise.

It’s a little funny, in that Beast’s own forums look more like 37signals’s signature style.

This year’s Apple-sponsored WWDC Bash isn’t on campus in Cupertino — it’s in San Francisco. Some people treat it as a pilgrimage, but it always struck me as a waste of time to move all those people all the way from Moscone to Cupertino.

But iPhone will be open, or else, because all of its competitors’
platforms support user-developed applications. Why do they all
support custom apps? Because. Sometimes, somebody other than Apple
gets to say, “because”. Open is just how phones are done, and not
just smart phones.

But there are all sorts of rules regarding “just how phones are done” that iPhone breaks. (E.g. A physical keypad for text and number input is just how phones are done.) I certainly hope Apple announces something at this year’s WWDC regarding third-party iPhone development. But the iPhone could launch completely closed and still be a huge hit. I almost hope it does just to prove people who say otherwise wrong.

And, if Apple were to launch the iPhone completely closed but start opening developer APIs, say, a year from now at WWDC 2008, then by 2010 the API-less iPhones would be as forgotten as the FireWire-only, Mac-only early iPods.

It’s been said many times that “the main person you’re writing comments for is yourself, six months in the future.” It’s always a good idea to keep that shadowy figure in mind while you code. Here are some other techniques I’ve found invaluable.

Friday, 4 May 2007

If you want to tell iPhoto to stop launching automatically when you connect a camera or mount a memory card, you can’t do it within iPhoto itself. You do it in Image Capture. (You can also use Image Capture to specify another app to launch automatically to handle image capturing.)

Robert A. Guth and Kevin J. Delaney, reporting for The Wall Street Journal:

Microsoft and Yahoo in recent months discussed a possible merger of the two companies or some kind of match-up that would pair their respective strengths, say people familiar with the situation. But the merger discussions are no longer active, these people say. The two companies may still explore other ways of cooperating.

Interesting sidenote to the story: It was The New York Post that originally broke the Microsoft-Yahoo-in-talks story. The Post is owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., which just made an unsolicited $5 billion bid to buy the Journal.

Suddenly these bigshot free-market reporters who always talk tough about layoffs when it’s GM or IBM now are running scared. Of course they say they’re wringing their hands about the “quality of the paper” and “editorial integrity” but come on — they’re worried because they know the place is 30% overstaffed and the Bancrofts don’t have the stomach for cuts. Murdoch, on the other hand, could squeeze a quarter between his butt cheeks and produce two dimes and a nickel plus a penny for his trouble.

In a comment on Kim Zetter’s article on the McCracken-Crawford conflict, a PC World staffer, defending McCracken, writes:

It’s worth noting that these pieces were produced for the web site
only. We’re under a lot of pressure to attract more traffic, and
these list stories can be blockbusters. We do view them as an
opportunity to be less serious — fluff is as good a word as any
— but why that should be such a problem is beyond me. If the New
Yorker ran the headline, nobody would flinch.

So in other words, the killed piece was sensational “less serious” fluff intended to generate hits to the web site. It’s hard to believe this person has ever even seen an issue of The New Yorker, the most literate and least sensational magazine I know of.

But Microsoft thinks in terms of platforms, not great products. Apple does it the reverse way: Ship something drool-worthy and watch people snatch it up. Do it again. And again. Suddenly, there’s a platform sitting there. Microsoft spends so much time plotting platforms that by the time the vision is complete, the world has already moved on. The old way of doing things doesn’t work any more.

The goat, known as Rose to close friends, became a web phenomenon when it was reported that she had been “married” to Sudanese man Charles Tombe. The wedding was enforced by elders after a drunken Tombe was found taking advantage of the poor animal. He was also made to pay a dowry to Rose’s original owner.

Once you start working in that world of DV with small, lightweight equipment and automatic focus, working with film seems so cumbersome. These 35mm film cameras are starting to look like dinosaurs to me. They’re huge; they weigh tons. And you’ve got to move them around. There are so many things that have to be done, and it’s all so slow. It kills a lot of possibilities. With DV everything is lighter; you’re more mobile. It’s far more fluid. You can think on your feet and catch things.

Thursday, 3 May 2007

James Duncan Davidson on why he switched from Aperture to Lightroom. Now that I’m using Lightroom, I’ve found O’Reilly’s Inside Lightroom weblog to be a terrific resource — even better now that Duncan is going to be writing for them.

Microsoft’s upcoming Office 2008 for Mac no longer supports VBA scripting. MacTech is offering a free version of their VBA to AppleScript transition guide on the web; a PDF version is available for $10.

Use silence as punctuation. My favorite trick in the book, especially since I’m a fast talker. When you hear yourself gaining verbal momentum, stop. Count backwards from 5. Walk across the stage. Resume. These breaks are going to give both you and your audience a chance to mentally regroup.

David Pogue reviews new hard-drive-based high-def video cameras from Sony and JVC. The Sony seems like a non-starter for most Mac users, as it records in AVCHD, a video format that works in neither iMovie nor Final Cut.

New consumer-oriented smartphone from BlackBerry. The biggest difference from the Pearl is that the Curve has a full QWERTY keyboard. The site is chock full of really corny copywriting; e.g. on the page describing the web browser:

Check the latest fashion, or even automotive trends online. Then send links to friends so they can see what’s hot… and what’s not.

Colleagues at my former outlet, PC World magazine, have told me that
Editor-in-Chief Harry McCracken quit abruptly today because the
company’s new CEO, Colin Crawford, tried to kill a story about Apple
and Steve Jobs.

The piece, a whimsical article titled “Ten Things We Hate About
Apple,” was still in draft form when Crawford killed it. McCracken
said no way and walked after Crawford refused to compromise.

Until the night of the crash, the magazine had never had to rely
on its backup server, Quittner said, so no one had noticed that
its programming was either obsolete or dysfunctional, or both.
Just last November, the magazine had listed off-site backup as
being among “the usual precautions.”

Highlights include new language modes (ActionScript, JSP-HTML, Smarty) and the ability to set a local URL for sites so you can use the preview feature for sites that need to run through an HTTP server (as opposed to plain old static HTML).

A note to everyone who believes that $499 is too much to pay for Apple’s iPhone: The Motorola RAZR was originally introduced at that price. It went on to become the best selling phone in the world before RAZR marketer Geoffrey Frost died and Motorola went on its “We will not be undersold” price-cutting binge.

Another open letter from Steve Jobs, this one addressing complaints about Apple’s environmental policies. Lots of very specific information about the toxic chemicals contained in Apple products, with comparisons to other companies like HP, Dell, and Lenovo.

There’s also some specific information about upcoming new Macs, including plans to introduce Macs with LCD displays that use LEDs instead of fluorescent lamps.

But now, after seeing hundreds of stories and reading thousands of
comments, you’ve made it clear. You’d rather see Digg go down
fighting than bow down to a bigger company. We hear you, and
effective immediately we won’t delete stories or comments
containing the code and will deal with whatever the consequences
might be.

So there’s this hexadecimal string that was leaked a few months ago — the secret decryption key for HD-DVDs. Web sites that post this string of hexadecimal digits — a number — have started getting takedown notices from whoever the jackasses are who own this so-called “intellectual property”. Digg started removing posts that contain it; as of this writing (1:20am ET), Digg users are revolting, and the entire front page of digg.com is chock full of highly-dugg submissions all containing the hexadecimal string in question.

I love the way that these MPAA fools think they can turn this key back into a secret using lawyers.

Tuesday, 1 May 2007

Now that Apple has updated QuickTime, 3Com has released additional details regarding Dino Dai Zovi’s exploit discovery. Thomas Ptacek has a nice overview of the bug — 5 lines of Java that can crash any browser with Java and QuickTime installed.

Lower bandwidth pricing, but they’re going to start charging separately for the requests themselves. 75 percent of existing S3 customers will save money with the new pricing; it seems the ones who’ll pay more are those who send a large number of requests for small bits of data.

We held back a dozen or so of the limited-edition DF t-shirts at the Coudal Partners Swap Meat to cover any shirts lost or damaged in shipping. All the original orders have been accounted for, so the remainders are now back on sale.

If you missed out during the original offer, jump quick — there are only a handful of each size left. (Each comes with a new one-year DF membership or extension.)

Joyent’s new framework for turning Ruby on Rails web apps into hybrid desktop apps, with synching between offline and online storage. Source code to be released next month under the GPL. (Great icon by Bryan Bell, too.)

After news of the offer was reported this morning on CNBC, shares of Dow Jones leaped 58 percent. News Corp. offered $60 a share in cash for all outstanding stock in Dow Jones — a whopping premium over the $36.33 closing price on Monday. Trading was briefly halted on the New York stock exchange, and the shares were selling above $57 at midday.

A $60/share offer for a stock trading at $36 is quite an audacious move.